what I'm learning

I'm taking a break from cooking. Working on burger patties, pulled pork, chili, and beans today for Friday's postponed July 4th luncheon. Later this week, I've got chips coming in from Coupang. I'll be ferrying food over to the office little by little over the course of the week. It's gonna be grand, but I'll have to watch out for angina.

What more have I learned, in the meantime, about the assassination attempt?

The shooter was apparently 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks,* another in a long line of uses-all-three-names-in-public assassins from John Wilkes Booth to Lee Harvey Oswald. He was 130-some yards off, so it should have been an easy shot. Crooks was gunned down by the Secret Service. (Death photo here. Find that fucker's parents. I have questions.)

Some on the left are already claiming the whole thing was a fake. Remember the movie "Bob Roberts"? In it, candidate Bob Roberts stages an assassination attempt against himself that results in an unhinged black conspiracy theorist being blamed for the shooting (the conspiracist turns out to be innocent: he's merely a patsy), which supposedly leaves Roberts paralyzed from the waist down. In the final moments of the movie, we see Roberts playing music and singing while sitting in a wheelchair, and the documentarian's camera focuses on Roberts's feet, one of which is tapping to the rhythm, ever so slightly. Could Trump have pulled a Bob Roberts? If so, wow. The shot apparently hit Trump's earlobe, so it was an inch away from hitting his brain. If he orchestrated that, then that has to be the ballsiest fake in history. It would also mean the kid really was a good shot at 130 yards. But by all accounts, a random move of the head is what saved Trump, so for this leftist theory to be true, Trump, in his late seventies, would have had to coordinate moving his head at exactly the right moment for the bullet to clip his ear. Use Occam's Razor: does this seem plausible? And why would a fake assassination attempt have to involve the death of an innocent bystander?

As one commenter says about the leftists claiming this was all staged:

Anyone suggesting this was faked is either a Fed or borderline retarded.

I hope that clears that up.

Meanwhile, Biden is refusing to call this an assassination attempt, and leftie media headlines have been saying things like, "Loud Pops Heard at Trump Rally," with no reference to the attempt on Trump's life. The media have also been caught distributing a memo telling them to downplay the assassination attempt. One black state senator has blamed MAGA for ratcheting up the rhetoric that led to this violence, which is, to put it politely, asinine. The left is the side that always chooses violence. The right does little more than mutter impotently. Don't expect much help to come from the Secret Service, FBI, or other authorities. This will all likely end with a shrug—yet another "known wolf" wacko that could have been stopped had people gotten off their fat, lazy asses.

There is one report suggesting that the bullet may have shattered a teleprompter, with a fragment lacerating Trump's ear (cue the "Bury My Heart at Wounded Ear" tee shirts... hell, I might make that design myself). That would imply that the shooter really was bad at his one job. So was he a crack shot, or was he an idiot? I'm going with idiot.

We're all still learning new info and sifting through it all to find a coherent narrative. This will take weeks, if not months. If nothing else, the assassination attempt will still be in the news cycle and fresh in everyone's minds when it's time for the September debates.

Which means Joe Biden will have to confront Donald "I'll Still Here, Fucker" Trump.

__________

*Appropriate name, eh? It's what Dr. Vallicella likes to call an aptronym, called an aptonym at Dictionary.com. I don't know who's right.